~ An occasional blog of thoughts and ideas

Very Short Review: Shutter Island (2010)

I haven’t seen every Martin Scorsese movie, but I’ve seen most and “Shutter Island” is easily the worst. Whatever the flaws of “Bringing Out The Dead” or “The Age of Innocence,” they weren’t boring and I never regretted watching them. Not so with “Shutter Island,” an exercise in lurid tedium. The movie starts out promisingly, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a harried federal marshal in the 1950s investigating a missing inmate at a mental institution on an island in Boston Harbor. Things go awry as DiCaprio quickly descends into typical horror movie territory: sinister scientists, driving rain, flashing lightning, now way to escape the island etc. Scorsese clearly has fun paying homage to the genre, and there are a few scenes that thrill. But rather than taking us on a brisk ride, he buries us in convoluted twists and turns, adding layers of exposition before finally delivering a twist so predictable it was telegraphed an hour earlier (particularly to anyone who saw A Beautiful Mind). DiCaprio does his best but seems wrong for the part – he’s too boyish and good looking to play a man at the end of his rope – and Mark Ruffalo again plays a federal agent who is not quite what he seems. A contrarian view might be that Scorsese was fully aware what he was doing, and he ladled on the melodrama with intent, perhaps as a misguided tribute to some B-movie from his youth. In either scenario it failed, utterly.